In 2014, Apple announced the release of Swift, a new programming language for all their platforms. Their programming language of choice on iOS and OSX has always been Objective-c, a language which is a bit dated (it predates C++) and as it has had new features (and syntaxes) bolted onto it every few years, it carries […]

The motivation The obvious question here is why would you want to develop .NET software on Linux or for Linux? At the risk of sounding like throwing buzzwords around, I will say it is because Linux dominates the cloud completely. Many cloud-related technologies such as Docker, Mesos, and others build on Linux as a base. […]

In this short blog I will show you how to manage a Docker container using Vagrant. Since version 1.6 Vagrant supports Docker as a provider, next to existing providers for VirtualBox and AWS. With the new Docker support Vagrant boxes can be started way faster. In turn Vagrant makes Docker easier to use since its […]

Many people use docker from the command line to build images, run containers and manage Docker on their machine. However, you can also run the same Docker commands via its remote REST API. In this blog I will guide you through Docker’s remote API using curl while pointing out a few details and tools that […]

Last Thursday I attended the NLUUG DevOps conference in Bunnik, near Utrecht. The NLUUG is the Dutch UNIX user group. In this blog I will summarize the talks I attended, some fun things I learned and I will discuss my own talk about continuous integration at a large organization.

In my previous blog article I gave a short introduction into Docker (“an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere”). In this article we’ll check out how to create an image for Tomcat 7 and the Java 7 JDK as dependency. So, let’s […]

Lately, I have been experimenting with Docker, a new open source technology based on Linux containers (LXC). Docker is most easily compared to Virtual Machines (VMs). Both technologies allow you to create multiple distinct virtual environments which can be run on the same physical machine (host). Docker also shares characteristics with configuration management tools like […]

Introduction These days I spend a lot of time in the bash shell. I use it for ad-hoc scripting or driving several Linux boxes. In my current project we set up a continuous delivery environment and migrate code onto it. I lift code from CVS to SVN, mavenize Ant builds and funnel artifacts into Nexus. […]

In a development environment, and often in the test and QA environments as well, we are thankfully blessed with a network that is for all intents and purposes infinitely fast, infinitely reliable and not shared with anyone else. Sometimes this causes you to miss a bug that only becomes apparent once your application has been […]

Puppet is a systems management platform that enables sysadmins and developers to standardise the deployment and management of the IT infrastructure. This blog entry shows you how to automate your configuration management using Puppet.